Nowhere. You have to have money to have money. If you trade your money for stocks you have stocks, not money.

Let's change it to anything but stocks and it starts to make more sense.

Suppose I buy a gold nugget for $100 based on the current market rate. Can I pay for a meal with it? No. Can I buy groceries with it? No. It's gold. I either have to find a person willing to trade with me for it (and then 'value' gets weird) or I have to sell it to someone so I can have money. I had $100, now I have gold.

If the price of gold goes up AND I can find someone who will buy my gold, then I can sell it to them. Now I have money, but I do not have gold. The money didn't appear by magic: they had to have it first and how they made it isn't my business.

If the price of gold goes down, my $100 is still in someone else's hands and I still have my gold. Nothing "went away". But now it's harder for me to find someone who will give me $100 back for the gold. If I find someone that gives me $95, I have less money than when I started, but the money didn't "go away". The person I originally gave $100 to still has it. I traded it to someone else for a different amount of money.

If you can't find someone to make the trade, then you technically haven't "made" or "lost" anything. You've still got exactly what you traded for. It's just not money and you can't find people who want to trade it.

That's why some people argue billionaires don't really have all of their money. If someone has $100m worth of some stock, they have stocks, not money. If they try to sell all of it at the same time, they might have a problem: usually the market for any stock isn't big enough to satisfy that kind of sale. So they can only sell some of it, and if investors hear they're trying to sell ALL of it they might get scared and stop buying. Then they can sell less of it AND people are willing to buy it for less.

Same thing with if I invest $100m into gold. I traded money for gold. That gold will probably go up in value, but I can't buy a hamburger with gold very easily. I have to trade gold for money so I can trade money for the hamburger. And there probably aren't a lot of people who want to buy $100m worth of gold all at once. So "How much money do I have?" is a very complicated question in that situation, but we can start by saying simply that I have no money, because I traded it all for gold. How much money can I get for that gold? That changes every minute based on how many people want to buy gold, how much gold they want, and how much they will pay. Sometimes the answer is lower, sometimes it's higher.

But the money I traded didn't go away or create more. It just went to a different person.

Not just computers, but most complex machines tend to have some kind of "memory". Stuff like jukeboxes could work way before we had computers, they used circuits we call "electromechanical" to basically accomplish what computers do with bigger, bulkier components.

Let's stick with a physical example. Some motors are very precise about how far they'll move if they recieve power for specific amounts of time. So robot arms and other things that need to do repetitive motions follow a "program" that's really just them applying power to the motors in specific patterns. But if something goes wrong and a gear slips, that can muck everything up. That means the arm didn't move as much as it should have, so from that point on the program's just a little bit wrong. If it keeps happening, the robot arm won't be doing what it's supposed to and is likely going to cause damage to something.

The startup process for these kinds of machines involves getting it into a "known state". For this kind of motor, it means there's usually physical barriers that stop the motor from turning too far in one direction. So to get it in a "known state", when the machine starts up it will turn the motor in that direction until sensors tell it that it has reached as far as it can go. (Or, it turns for an amount of time guaranteed to put it in that position.) Now the system "knows" where the motor is again and is safe.

(More sophisticated motors have more sensors and can tell where they are, but they cost more and don't make this explanation work so well.)

That's kind of what can happen with computers and more sophisticated machines, too. Their program or even the circuits may have tiny problems that cause tiny mistakes. Those mistakes may not be harmful for the first few hours, which is why the developers didn't notice them. But over time those tiny mistakes might add up and start causing the program to do weird things, sort of like how if the gear for the robot arm slips the program is now incorrect because the arm is not in the position it should be.

The reason you have to sometimes leave it off "for about 5 minutes" is interesting. NORMALLY a good computer should go through all of its memory and set it back to a safe state when it starts up. But that can take a long time so it's a step that might get skipped. But most memory doesn't "hold" its value for very long if the power is not on, and eventually ends up in the known state anyway. So if the program doesn't clear memory at startup (or if there's a bug that causes it to miss some memory), turning off the power for long enough to make ALL of the memory reset can fix that little issue.

So it's kind of like if after you turn off the robot arm, you manually manipulate it into the "safe" position before turning it on. That makes sure it's in the state the program expects.

This isn't really normal. I've got 2 Windows machines and 3 Macs and Office only has boring fonts in my language on them.

Tax law is complex and this is a place for oversimplification, so it's hard to answer in detail. Even the concept of "taxes" varies a lot by jurisdiction.

But in general, if a tax is an "income tax" how much you pay depends directly on how much "income" you have. I put it in quotes because the definition of "income" is going to be the concern of an awful lot of the relevant tax law. It's more complex than just "how much money you made".

For example, if you own a business, it's understood that you have to use some portion of your money on business expenses like salaries. Since those salaries become employee income that gets taxed, that's some money that you can subtract from your business's "income". There are a lot of other categories of expenses that the law decides is worthy of removal from your "income".

Usually a "write off" is some thing that costs money that you normally wouldn't buy, but if you spend money on it that money gets subtracted from your "income" and creates an advantageous situation.

One way that happens is when taxes are "bracketed". For example, a very simple "bracketed" income tax might say you pay 0% on up to $10, 1% on $10-$100, and 10% on $100-$1000. So if you get paid $120 for something, you pay:

• $0 on the first $10 ($140 remains)
• $1 (1%) for the next $100 ($10 remains)
• $1 for the remaining $10 (at the 10% tax rate)

So in this case, you might really want to try and find a way to "write off" $10 of your income. If you can buy something that lets you deduct it from your income, your $110 will only get taxed $1 instead of $2 for the $120. You "lost" $10 on some business expenses, but it saved you $1 in taxes so it's more like you got a 10% discount on that expense, in the big picture. In real-life scenarios, sometimes a write-off means a person goes from paying taxes to getting a refund!

That's the kind of situation where people consider write-offs: sometimes spending a little bit of money can dramatically reduce how much you owe in taxes.

It is different for students, corporations, and independent workers, but that's mainly because:

• Students don't generally have a lot of income, and likely have a lot of debts, so they don't tend to have complicated income scenarios or owe a lot of taxes unless they're very well off. The things they can write off tend to be related to loan payments/interest.
• Corporations have a lot of assets, a lot of expenses that can be write-offs, and the resources to hire lawyers and accountants that let them structure their "income" in different ways.
• Independent workers are basically like small corporations: common write-offs are money spent for office space (even if you build a home office, it can be deducted from income if it meets certain criteria), equipment, supplies, etc.

But you could also say it's "the same" for all of them, because the idea is we want to tax people who make a lot of money and spend it on luxury more than we want to tax people who make a lot of money but invest that money back into business ventures and we DON'T want to tax people who aren't making a lot of money. This gets kind of cloudy and frustrating because it means rich people get a lot of ways to not pay taxes on income, and the way companies "invest" the money doesn't always benefit their workers the way the system intends. People in the middle don't tend to have as much flexibility and it can be frustrating to hear that a man is worth $200 billion but gets to publicly brag that he's not sure if he plans on paying any taxes.

Yeah I picked Ritz because it's one brand I'll stick with. I got the store brand once and they were actually really good, but apparently I picked an above-average box because the next three were flavorless and bad. Went back to Ritz because the worst box of Ritz is still better than the average box of store brand.

People still buy and want name brands. Sometimes this is just because of brand loyalty, other times they perceive real differences in quality between name brands and store brands. So if people really want Ritz crackers and not an off-brand, they'll stop shopping at a place that doesn't sell Ritz.

Some stores DO take this approach. For example, Trader Joe's only sells their own brand. But you'll note they are much smaller than chains that sell other brands like Kroger, Publix, HEB, etc.

I'm sure the stores think about it. But they know some % of customers who buy the name brands will stop shopping entirely if the name brands go away. So maybe some people will just buy the store brand Ritz crackers, but a lot of other people will go to a different store and that represents losing dozens of other item' worth of sales.

In the end, it doesn't matter what your margin is if there's not a customer to buy the product. So selling items at lower margins is better than not selling anything at all.

Yeah, the thing I mentioned about "selling in patterns" is based on something I vaguely remember a while back regarding Zuckerberg. He did a big selloff right before Facebook/Meta announced some big embarrassment and people were certain he'd face insider trading, but "this fits a pattern of seasonal sales" was the excuse I saw some people throw around and I never heard anything about it again.

Personally at that level I think it'd be cheaper to hire a US Senator to do the buying/selling for you, they're immune to insider trading and they can count their cut as campaign money.

Think of the insurance company like a bank. They take the money from everybody's premiums and put it in one big pool of money. Their "bet" is that the number of accidents their customers have will cost less in claims than the big pool of money. That means they have money left over and can use that money to hire more people, advertise, invest, etc. They lose money if they're wrong, and peoples' claims exceed the amount of money they took in.

So one thing they do to make sure they win this gamble is they employ people who are very good at statistics and data analysis called "actuaries". These peoples' job is to look over as much data as possible and come up with what the "risk" of people who fit certain profiles are. That "risk" helps the insurance company figure out how much it should charge for premiums. Actuaries are creepy good at this stuff, but mostly because statistical analysis is creepy accurate when looking at data based on millions of people over decades.

But an individual's level of risk is not the ONLY thing that impacts this. The economy definitely matters.

When I was a kid, a fancy car cost about $30,000 and you could do pretty well for about $15k. Today, finding decent cars for less than $20k is hard "fancy" cars are easily $80k. Now think about that. When my parents bought an $8,000 used car, that's the value they were trying to insure. Now, the same kind of car costs about $24,000. That means if I total the car, the insurance company owes me 3x as much as it owed my parents! So it follows that I probably should have to pay more to insure it.

This is kind of happening across the board. I had a conversation with my agent last year and he complained about it. Even small things like windshield cracks are going through the roof, because now windshields incorporate features like sensors to automatically turn on wipers or need special areas to facilitate built-in cameras and traffic assist sensors that also may need recalibrating. My car's front bumper has an array of 8 parking assist sensors that cost $200 EACH to replace, not to mention the labor involved with recalibrating them. My parents' car? The bumper by itself probably cost less than one of those sensors. So now if I get in a small accident that damages the bumper, it might cause $2,000-$3,000 worth of "damage" to the car.

Risk did not go down, but the costs of each accident have gone up. So there's the same number of accidents, but they cost more per claim. That means the insurance company needs a bigger "pool" of money, and the only way to get it is to raise premiums.

This is also happening in other insurance fields because of inflation and other factors. A house that cost $90,000 10 years ago and costs $400,000 today will, naturally, command a higher insurance cost.

Healthcare's constantly going up. There's a giant pandemic we decided would be convenient to ignore. It's leading to catastrophic numbers of deaths, and that translates to life insurance claims. It's also leading to an extra few million people facing some form of disability, which means medical treatment, which means more insurance payouts. More and more people are getting diabetes, which requires them to get insulin, which is excessively priced and leads to higher claims. We also split our "pool" of healthcare in the US among hundreds of different insurance companies instead of having one big "pool": that means each individual company has to work harder to make sure its "pool" is big enough so they don't go out of business. It also means they have to be pickier about what treatments they approve, which sometimes means someone isn't given preventative treatment so they later develop a more expensive chronic condition. (The insurance company sort of gambles that they die or get fired and thus lose coverage instead.)

Then you have to figure it's all connected. If you get in an accident, it's never JUST the cost of the car. You might owe something to the other person if you caused the accident and that might be part of the claim. There might be healthcare costs on either side. Since all of those are ballooning without bound it costs more, which costs insurance more, which means they charge you more.

All of this is making the size of the "pool" needed by insurance companies bigger. The more expensive everything gets, the more expensive insurance gets. The good news is the more expensive everything gets, the more money the people so rich they don't need insurance make!

This is true and a product of me oversimplifying.

This is very hard to answer definitively because what information they track is secret. If they explained their algorithm for human detection, people would update their bots to look more like humans.

What we can glean from some discussions about it and some common sense is that a lot more is going on than just whether you click the right images or the check box. Sometimes you don't even have to click trains or crosswalks or non-civilian targets.

The code already knows a lot about the person you claim to be and the things you usually do. It's already made some guesses based on your IP, the information your browser gives up, the time of day, and what site you're trying to visit. All of that alone is probably enough to verify that you are the right person, but it's not enough to verify you aren't running a program working on your behalf to do things in a fashion the website owner doesn't want.

So it also tracks how your mouse moves to the checkbox when it's time to click. Bots can sometimes move in a very "not natural" way so it looks at the mouse movements to decide if a bot's involved. Maybe you did touch input: that still gives a lot of data about the "tap gesture" like the size of the tap, how long the finger stayed down, the shape of the tap, etc. Bots don't simulate that very well, or when they have to generate multiple taps they tend to create recognizable patterns.

All of that is real squirrely. Sometimes you have to go through multiple rounds of "click the picture". That's probably when something about your input looks "not human enough" so the system wants to see more. Eventually you make it confident enough it's dealing with a human it lets you through.

(Let us also not forget Google sells products based on its image recognition AIs: a side goal of this program has always been presenting images their AI has trouble classifying to humans who can help train it to be better.)

The thing is this is kind of like locks on a house's front door. A person who's spent a few months practicing with lockpicks can get inside silently in less than 30 seconds. But even among criminals the number of people who invest that much is a small percentage, and the people who do generally look for bigger scores than the average household contains. So a simple deadbolt is enough to keep out a large number of criminals, but for the ones not deterred it means they tend to try noisier or more violent forms of entry, which is less likely to go undetected.

That's what bot detection does. Many bots just aren't sophisticated enough to pass the gate. The ones that are get slowed down by dealing with the process. Part of the goal of regulating bots is making sure bot traffic doesn't overwhelm sites and APIs, and slowing down bots is one way to accomplish it.

So no, it's not a perfect shield against bots and can sometimes even reject legitimate humans. But the purpose is to make it harder to use bots and to make the bots that work less efficient. It's good at doing that.

It's not automatically insider trading for a person involved with a company to trade in its stock. This law has a lot of subjective leeway. But it IS true that it is HARDER for people in these positions to trade stock in their company without risk.

Oversimplified, you break the law if you have information that is not yet public that would likely affect other traders' opinions of whether to buy or sell stock. But it's sort of time-sensitive and it's easier to get in trouble for short-term decisions than long-term ones.

So a CEO who sells their stock immediately before a bad quarterly earnings report? They'll likely get in trouble. A bad earnings report usually motivates people to sell. However, even if they sell 10 seconds after that report goes public, THAT is fine because now the information is public.

What if the CEO knows that next year a super-secret project is going to release and starts buying in advance? This falls much more on the subjective side of the law. It's harder to argue that if it were known a super-secret project will happen next year that investors in general would invest in the stock today. And there are still chances that between today and next year, things happen that cause the project to be canceled. So this scenario is much more grey area.

So people have a lot of strategies to avoid this. One is to announce projects to reduce how much "secret" knowledge you're leaning on. Another is to buy and sell large amounts of stock on a schedule, so you can argue you're following a pattern and not basing the decision on product announcements.

A problem with it being so subjective is it can look like a lot of times rich people get away with something that less rich people might get busted for. It's a different discussion entirely, but it's more likely that very rich people will employ lawyers and accountants who work together to assess their risk of insider trading charges whereas less wealthy people are more likely to go on their own thoughts.

To be fair, "How does this work?" leaves a lot of interpretation to the reader. Part of getting a good answer is asking a good question. Sometimes you whiff when you have to guess.

Thanks for your helpful contribution though, it really added to the sub.

The earth spins as it's rotating around the sun. That means if we drew a line from the sun through the center of the earth, that line would hit a different part of the planet every moment that passes.

It just so happens we've divided the day into 24 "hours", and the sun hits the same place twice if you wait that long. (Technically it's a tiny bit different from 24 hours but that's something that only matters once we get into higher-end calculations.)

So the "time zones" are made by borders that are ROUGHLY where that "direct" line from the sun hits an hour apart. I say "ROUGHLY" because these are also political boundaries so they're set by people who vote or own land etc.

This was done for our own timekeeping convenience, so that we could understand questions like, "When is it morning on the west coast?" easier. Imagine if we made everything use East Coast time. That would mean we'd have to remember that "morning" in California will be somewhere around "noon" in this time.

Is it really easier to remember, "California is 4 hours later than NY so at 8AM in NYC it is 4AM in California"? Well, that's subjective. But this is how we did it, and it'd be at least as complicated to do it the other way.

The main place where this makes the most sense is day boundaries. We understand when the time changes from 11:59 PM to 12:00 AM the date has changed. But if we didn't have time zones, some people's day would start at 1AM. Some would start at 2 AM. Everyone's day would roll over at a different time of day. They'd have to show up to work at a different hour, etc.

From that perspective, even if you travel to a far-away place, it's easier to remember, "I need to be at the office when all the clocks around me say 8AM" than it is to figure out, 'OK, here the workday starts at 7PM so that's when I need to be at the office.'

So, put short: it ties our time to roughly when we expect the sun to rise and set. If we didn't have time zones, in some places the sun would rise at midnight, and the name "midnight" wouldn't make a lot of sense if associated with 12 AM.

Edit

To answer your question: yes, they record multiple intros. Most of these shows are mixtures of live TV and pre-recorded cuts, and often they cut to other actors. So they might do the startup of the show with a pre-recorded introduction, then the title jingle, then move to live footage. Or, in the Eastern time zone, they might be running a commercial break while the host does a live introduction for the Western time zone. Then when that introduction is finished, the Western time zone gets commercials or another segment, and eventually everything syncs back up to live footage again. Sometimes "live" shows like this aren't actually "live" in all time zones because of these logistics.

In a nutshell, when your computer sends a "message" over the internet, that message goes to a computer at your ISP. The message has a "header" that says, "I'm this address, I'm trying to send it to that address." The ISP computer tries to find that address or, if it can't, it tries to find one it knows that's a little closer, and the process repeats. Every computer that gets this message has a chance to read it, store it, etc.

Proxy: a tiny bit of security against snooping

A "proxy" is a machine you tell your computer to ALWAYS send the message to first. This changes the way the "header" works a little bit. You send to the proxy "I'm this address, I want to send to that address". But when the proxy get it, it changes it to "I'm <the proxy address>, I want to send to that address". The message goes to other computers, and when it comes back to the proxy, the proxy rejiggers the message so it goes to you. This adds a bit of privacy, as everything past the proxy only knows the proxy sent the message. Note that your ISP is still between you and the Proxy, so there are still some computers that get a chance to see the message and/or record it.

VPN: a lot of things, but also more security against snooping

A VPN can be a lot of things, but right now we're interested in how it's sort of like a proxy. Normally for computers to talk directly to each other they need to be (oversimplified) connected to the same network, and "same network" here is a very restrictive concept. A VPN is a way to break the rules and treat a lot of "not connected" computers as if they were on the same network.

But in the context I'm smelling, you're also interested in "VPN tunnels". Oversimplified, a VPN using this feature ALWAYS demands that the traffic between you and the VPN is encrypted. So while you're still using your ISP's computers to transfer data, now all the ISP sees is "Oh, this is an encrypted message to a VPN. Think of it kind of like if you don't want people to know who you send a message to, you put the "real" envelope inside another envelope and mail it to someone else you trust. So it's LIKE a proxy, only now it hides the part BEFORE the proxy from anyone who can intercept it there. (Whether it's encrypted AFTER the VPN is up to whoever you're connecting to.)

Torrents: a file sharing protocol that's a completely different topic

One problem with downloading big files from a server is those servers might be unreliable. If it goes down, the download stops, and generally it's not easy to find another server or convince that other server to resume where you left off. This is especially true when doing "peer to peer" downloads, where the "server" is other peoples' machines which can be frequently losing connections or slow.

Torrents split files into lots of small "chunks" and everybody who has a complete chunk might be a "server" when you are downloading. If 100 people have the "chunk" you need, you can get it from the fastest one and keep doing that over and over. If 50 people lose their connection, you might not even notice and at worst you only lose 50 "chunks" of progress. This tends to lead to faster, more reliable downloads as long as people don't intentionally cut off uploads.

Probably what you meant to ask:

Torrents are amoral. They can be used to distribute legitimate files AND they can be used to distribute files that could get you in trouble whether or not we agree they should get you in trouble.

If you use a proxy to download torrents, your ISP could still potentially know you're downloading a file and, if they do some digging, what files you're downloading from who. That is bad news if you're doing things that could get you in trouble, and in some cases the ISP is obligated to report you or else they will get in trouble.

If you use a VPN, the ISP only knows you're receiving a lot of data through a VPN. Maybe they're suspicious it's something that could get you in trouble, but it could ALSO be something legitimate and they have no way to tell. The VPN company could, perhaps, do some snooping. But it's very bad for their business to do that, so many VPNs base themselves in countries where they are not obligated to do this snooping and promise they'll never do it.

This tech is, again, amoral. You can use it to hurt people while remaining anonymous. That's why a lot of people want to make it illegal. But that line of thinking is flawed, because sometimes there are very good reasons to want to be anonymous even when you aren't hurting people. I highly doubt people who say "I have nothing to hide" would be excited about a law that requires they shout their name and address while using a public restroom. "That's not the same", they'd say, but I don't find they can usually provide a good explanation why it's different. Please don't do things that hurt people with this knowledge and make those people feel more right.

There are two things these sites do: DNA sequencing and genealogy.

Genealogy is a big field. Lots of people, both professional and hobbyist, spend hours combing over public records or walking through graveyards, taking careful notes. They build very detailed records of who is related to who based on these records.

But those records are often incomplete. Sometimes the father isn't reported at birth. Some children are born in secret and not recorded. Sometimes birth records are falsified. Genealogists ALSO try to figure that stuff out. Sometimes people who find out their parents weren't biological hire detectives to try and put together where they came from. If that gets back to a genealogist that can help them piece together more accurate records. (I had this happen, I found out when I was around 19 that certain aspects of my family tree were lies to cover up some things a different family member was too embarrassed to admit.)

The most extreme cases are things like the fertility doctor who was using his own sperm on patients instead of the donors they had selected. There are dozens of people we know have incorrect biological lineage because of him, and we're not 100% sure how many more there might be because he wasn't consistent and even he can't remember every time he did it.

DNA sequencing helps do that. If it finds a close match, some detective work might reveal there was a birth that wasn't reported properly. Sometimes it's just coincidence. Sometimes the people who know the truth all dead. But generally if people match enough and have parents who were geographically near each other roughly 9 months before their birthday it's not a stretch to assume there might've been a misreported birth.

Basically, our eyes and the tools we use don't have the precision to tell the difference.

Think about it. If I draw a line on a piece of paper then draw a dot on that line, the center of the dot can't be EXACTLY any one value past a certain precision. And even if I have high precision, your eye won't be able to tell the difference between "1.33333333333333" and "1.33333333333334" unless you use highly calibrated measuring tools and microscopes.

Likewise, on a computer screen, it's hard to display things between pixels accurately, so there's always a bit of fudge too.

TL;DR: Number lines aren't 100% accurate. They're "close enough", where the definition of that word varies based on what tools are being used.

They're used when the people making a video want to replace the background with something else. It's very hard to tell a computer where "a person" ends and "the background" begins against normal things, because our clothes might be the same color as background objects. Having one specific color nobody is wearing makes it easier to tell the computer "pick this one color and shades near it and replace those". (You can often see it mess up in Twitch streams if the streamer has a hat or something else that has a shade close to their background.)

Why green? Well, it used to be "blue screen". The difference is analog film vs. digital film. For whatever reason, analog film is better at recording shades of blue and digital film sensors are better at picking up shades of green. Since filming is almost exclusively done with digital equipment now, green screens are more common than blue screens. But it could be any color.

(I think the reason digital sensors pick up green better is they're synthetic. As in, digital sensors are tiny things we build. Our eyes pick up shades of green better than other colors, so we probably decided to design digital image sensors to mimic that. Analog film, on the other hand, is chemicals reacting with light so it's harder or impossible to make them model the human eye.)

If they were both floating in space, you'd have a situation similar to what you're thinking. Both the wagon and the child would accelerate towards each other. However, the wagon would move faster, because it (presumably) has less mass than the child, so the force accelerating the wagon would have more effect than the equal and opposite force accelerating the child.

They are not both floating in space. The child's feet are on the ground, and the wagon's wheels are on the ground. They are both accelerating towards the Earth's center of gravity. This means while the child experiences a horizontal force, that force also acts on their feet which are acting on the ground. Friction between the child's feet and the ground causes the child to stay in place. On the other side, the wagon's wheels do not produce as much friction and roll freely, so it moves. (Technically we could say the forces here have an impact on the Earth's motion, but in this case the difference in masses is so great we can ignore it.)

Imagine if you take the wheels off of the wagon and load it up with 400 pounds of concrete. Now something very different happens: the child pulls, but the wagon stays still. In fact, the child will very strongly feel the friction of their feet on the ground, and if they shift their weight just so they might even slide towards the wagon.

Redundancy. That's why we have 2 of a lot of things that function just fine with only 1.

If a creature gets injured, there's a chance only 1 of the 2 will be injured and that creature will still be able to have kids. So at some point maybe some ancestral creatures had only one testicle, but those were more likely to be unable to reproduce so they got kicked out of the gene pool by creatures with 2. Humans inherited this trait from whatever creatures developed this over millions of years.

It's possible nature never tried 3, but more likely other factors meant creatures with 3 didn't have advantages or had a disadvantage over creatures with 2. I can think of one that relates to a flaw in baseball: a man with 4 balls cannot walk!